Ana Gabriela Pessoa (more)

Title of Talk: Small Revolutions in Becoming an Entrepreneur

Ana Gabriela Pessoa is the CEO and founder of Ezlearn Educacional, an education technology company based in Rio de Janeiro. She is passionate about education reform and is keen on studying how technology can be used as a means to enhance learning, especially through adaptive learning platforms and social networking. Ezlearn uses a “social network” approach to education and leverages web 2.0 to offer high-quality educational content at a low price. The company seeks to disrupt the status quo.

Shortly after completing her Master’s in International Education Policy at Harvard as a Lemann Fellow, Pessoa returned to Brazil, where she prepared to launch Ezlearn and its first product, meuInglês (“My English”). meuInglês is a personalized online learning system which helps Brazilians learn English using video lessons, social networks, and other learning technologies. Since launching in February 2009, its online community has grown to over 40,000 people. The community helps build trust, support, motivation, and connections between users. In the future, Ezlearn plans to expand the range of products offered using the same learning platform.

Prior to her studies at the Harvard, Pessoa worked at Senac Rio, the largest professional education network in Brazil, and at Universidade Estácio de Sá, the largest for- profit university in Brazil.

In addition to her Masters from Harvard, Ana Gabriela has an MBA in Project Management from the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro and BA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.